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Jia Wertz had a particular reason for going to film school. It had nothing to do with fulfilling a life-long dream of becoming the next celebrated auteur.
Becoming a filmmaker was never part of the plan while growing up in Calgary. In fact, for decades she worked in marketing in the fashion industry in both San Francisco and her current home of New York City. But, as with thousands of others, Wertz became obsessed with the popular true-crime podcast Serial when it launched in 2014. The first season focused on the 1999 murder of 18-year-old high school student Hae Min Lee. Her former boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was eventually charged and convicted of the murder and spent 23 years in prison before he was released in 2022.
But in 2015, he was still in prison for a crime the podcast argued he didn’t commit. Wertz eventually hosted a fundraiser for Syed’s defence fund that year. Using her fashion skills and contacts, she also created and sold a series of #FreeAdnan T-shirts. They became a worldwide phenomenon, helping raise funds and awareness for the case. But it didn’t feel like it was enough.
She attended Syed’s post-conviction hearing and was shocked by what she saw as widespread corruption in the U.S. justice system that allowed a teenager to be “railroaded” and spend a good chunk of his life in prison. She decided she wasn’t satisfied with helping raise money for Syed and others she felt had been wrongly convicted.
So she enrolled in the New York Film Academy.
“When I went to film school, it was with the goal of shedding light for this cause,” says Wertz, in an interview with Postmedia from her home in New York City.
When Wertz organized the 2015 fundraiser for Syed, she brought in Jeffrey Deskovic as the keynote speaker. At the age of 16, Deskovic was convicted of the rape and murder of a classmate, 15-year-old Angela Correa. It was largely based on a false confession he made after numerous interrogations but quickly withdrew. He spent 16 years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement. He was eventually exonerated through new DNA evidence. The real killer, who killed again while Deskovic was in prison, also confessed. Deskovic later became a lawyer and an advocate for the wrongfully convicted.
Wertz decided Deskovic’s story would be a compelling subject for her first documentary.
“Jeff, at the time, was the only person I knew who had that experience, so I reached out to him and said, ‘Hey, can I follow you around and film you?’” she says, “That’s how it all started.”
Conviction is a 21-minute documentary that began making the festival rounds in 2020. Focusing primarily on Deskovic’s reintegration and advocacy work, the film won a number of awards. It began streaming on Amazon Prime Video in the United States and other countries years ago but the filmmaker always faced roadblocks when it came to showing it in her home country. Finally, four years after the film was released elsewhere, Amazon Prime Video picked it up in July for streaming in Canada. The film ends with Deskovic receiving his law degree at a graduation ceremony. The postscript reveals that through the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice, he had helped free seven wrongfully convicted people as of 2019 and played a role in having Connecticut abolish the death penalty.
Conviction chronicles not only his post-prison reintegration and advocacy, but also includes often harrowing descriptions of Deskovic’s life at a maximum security prison at a young age, his estrangement from his family and his belief that he would die in prison an innocent man.
“When I first met Jeff, it was a little strange,” Wertz says. “He had a lot of after-effects of growing up in prison. When Jeff went to prison he was 17. He got involved in this whole court case when he was only 16. So he was just a kid. So he grew up in n max-security adult prison around dangerous men and it was tough being around him at the beginning. He would get agitated very easily. I didn’t know what was happening because I had never been around someone who grew up in prison and had these sorts of reactions to everyday things. He would get really agitated by loud noises. If the phone rang, he would get agitated. Or if someone was honking a horn while we were walking outside talking, he would get agitated.”
Wertz said she was “walking on eggshells” with him, but he eventually explained that loud noises in prison were never good. He could never get over that.
“When you are in prison, any loud noise — keys jingling, boots stomping on the ground, any yelling, anyone talking loudly — was always a sign of danger,” she says. “He still has those reactions.”
Wertz has also completed a feature-length film on Deskovic called Sixteen Years. Her agent is currently in talks with various streaming services and Wertz hopes the film will be released later this year. It goes into much more detail about the case and behaviour of police and prosecutors. Alongside American radio veteran John Gully, she co-hosts the true-crime podcast Speaking of Crime.
Born in Calgary, Wertz studied fashion at George Brown College in Toronto after graduating from Ernest Manning High School and began a 20-year career in the fashion industry. But even early on, she found herself deeply affected by the plight of the wrongfully convicted. While managing Below the Belt clothing stores in Calgary malls between high school and college, Wertz discovered the case of Rubin “The Hurricane” Carter. He was a middleweight boxer wrongfully convicted of murder in the mid-1960s. She saw the story first in Norman Jewison’s 1999 film Hurricane and later read Rubin’s 1974 autobiography, The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender To 45472.
“It’s still, to this day, my favourite book and I give a copy of it to almost everybody that I ever send a gift to in this world,” she says.
The book and movie were eye-opening. Up to that point, it never occurred to Wertz that the police could be “the bad guys” in a story. It always stuck with her. Now, as a filmmaker, she hopes to continue telling these stories.
“When innocent people get wound up in it, it’s beyond heartbreaking,” Wertz says. “Because instead of these people — cops, detectives, prosecutors who are supposed to protect the public — getting it right, they create another victim. So there’s the person who was murdered and now there is an innocent person in prison, so that’s another victim being created out of thin air. Lastly, the actual perpetrator is free.
“In Jeff’s case, the guy who really did it remained free for 16 years while Jeff was in prison and he went on to murder a teacher. She would have still been alive had they gotten it right. There were so many injustices that followed and that’s what really got me.”